


The Stray

by jobey_wan



Category: Anne of Green Gables - L. M. Montgomery
Genre: AU, F/F, Four Winds but the Cuthberts never adopted Anne Shirley, Gilbert is in Glen St. Mary and married to Josie Pye, Katherine leaves Sunnyside for a harbor town, Leslie's predicament never gets resolved, though it didn't seem worth adding to the relationships list, where she never has to see another gods becursed Pringle again ty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:07:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27580475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jobey_wan/pseuds/jobey_wan
Summary: From @sanquintina prompt: 'Really? You made him do that? No wonder he is so ill. Just look at him, poor thing.' Genders changed to accommodate the ridiculously proud and self-protective protagonists.
Relationships: Katherine Brooke/Leslie Moore
Comments: 2
Kudos: 1
Collections: Hurt/Comfort Throwdown 2020





	The Stray

**Author's Note:**

  * For [simplecoffee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplecoffee/gifts).



> @simplecoffee, I do think I got so caught up in the universe-premise of this that I lost sight of the prompt at times. And no matter how many passes I take at it, I can’t quite recover… maybe I’m just not cut out for whump. But I wanted to give you a heads-up from the start! 
> 
> Also, I just couldn't stop them using the L-word. They've already been dancing around for a while. They know what they're talking about, and not going to bunk it forever. 
> 
> I did remove all L’s and K's cringey quotations from overly-mainstream Samuel Taylor Coleridge poetry, though; insofar as that I definitely tried to keep this trim and tailored with you in mind. ♥

That night at Four Winds there were closer to four thousand winds. A wild convocation of sickly body politic, unable to decide between themselves in which direction they were wending, nor even whence they had journeyed. Revolution reigned in the skies, while the mortals who crawled upon the the surface merely closed themselves up tight and endured. Something that had once been rain, but was then sharpened into knives, attacked the harbor. Poplars and pines, massive though they were, groaned with the effort to keep their grip upon the earth. The one mercy was that it had been a storm that all had seen coming. No man ought to have been out in it, and throughout the harbor and glen no man was. 

Of course, Katherine Brooke was no man. 

Albeit she could thump upon the back door with as much pounding violence as any of them. 

Her fists slammed as if convinced that they must put up the fight of their lives to be heard against the shrieking gale. 

They needn’t. Mrs. Dick Moore had been in the kitchen, despite the foolish risk of being so near the windows in such an apocalypse, watching and waiting for any sign of her special friend. 

Her special fool. 

Despite this rather unmistakable signal, Leslie allowed the pounding to go on some time. If she opened the door after the mere minute, it was only because she feared that much more of the firing fists would shatter her little husband Dick from the glazed-over reverie with which he was contemplating the deluge. 

Unwilling to set him off—unwilling to endure him being set off—Leslie opened her homestead to the muddy, sodden, blue-lipped schoolma’am, the squeaking russet-colored kitten that leapt from her arms to the floor in a straight shot to her master, and a whoosh of rain that left the floorboards splattered and treacherous. The women had to push against the door together in order to force back the wind and reclaim their sanctuary against the forces of barbarity. 

Then it was profound quiet, indoors. The kitten’s purring, and Dick’s unintelligible yelping, compared as nothing to the raging storm. The cackling of the fire was actually inaudible. 

Katherine had sheltered the kitten as much as her arms and bosom could allow, but they had been nothing against the deluge. Soon Russell, desperate and agitated at first, but gradually soothed, writhed and stretched, among a warm dry cuddle of fire-warmed quilts and Dick, murmuring endearments.

Katherine, hair drenched and flattened, looked beadily at Leslie, as rain wept from her clothes and puddled ‘round her boots. 

Leslie looked at Katherine. 

Katherine looked over at Dick and the cat, with an expression that would have been wistfulness on any face but hers. 

Without looking her own self, Leslie wordlessly held out the second fire-warmed quilt. 

* * * 

Leslie’s fury did not burn itself out all night. But a soul would have to be far more in the clutches of the devil than Leslie Moore’s before turning anyone back out in the storm, and Katherine spent the night in her old room. She was even supplied with dry nightclothes, a checkered “apple-blossom” quilt of Bryantine origins, and (a bit grudgingly) several hot-water bottles. Leslie could be very cold indeed. But in the most freezing furies of her life, she was incapable of being cruel. 

She would have even fed Katherine breakfast the following morning, before sending her on her way with the fewest words imaginable. And, if the fare was slight and humble, it was not for a snub. It was what Leslie could afford that spring, and Katherine would surely know it.

But Katherine never emerged from her upstairs lair.

Dick could never remember names; Leslie was not sure he could even see the image of a face in his memory. Every time he saw someone, he gaped at them, learning their features for the first time. But he did know, when there was someone else in the house, and when there wasn’t. He spent breakfast looking around, so worried and confused that Leslie at last had to take pity on him before his frightened eyes drove her mad. “The schoolma’am is in the boarders’ bedroom. Why don’t you make up a tray.”

It took a good twenty minutes, for him to take it up, and make his investigations, and to drag Leslie by the hand back up the stairs with him. They marched boldly into the room without knocking. He had already tried. Katherine was still in bed. At least, her wild, frizzing, unbrushed black hair way, splayed dramatically on the bedclothes, and mostly concealing her face.

Mostly.

“Poor thing.” Dick pointed at the woman. “Poor thing!” 

Before his last departure and his strange accident, Dick Moore had never known a moment’s empathy… not least to any soul of the female persuasion. 

Upon his return, his sense of compassion was, if anything, overdeveloped. Leslie had known her mentally-straightened little husband to _poor thing_ a howling Carlo, a china shepherdess with painted tears, the western wind when it sounded rather tired and sad as it complained off the sea, and any cats doing literally anything. Alone free from his hapless compassion was herself. If he caught her crying, he only stared, silent and terrified, sometimes biting his lip and himself dry-sobbing in a genuinely wretched way that tore Leslie away from her own relief to attend to his fright. 

Anyway, for once the object of his pity was quite appropriate. The schoolma’am _was_ in a bad way. 

“Go downstairs, Dickie,” said Leslie, voice low and steady.

“I want to help!”

“Feed Carlo and Russell, there’s a good boy.”

For her own part, Leslie heated water, hunted linen, and fetched certain items from her medicine chest, all in silence.

The very special silence of a clever, capable, strong-willed woman who has not spoken her heart for twenty years.

* * * 

Katherine Brooke was a strong-willed woman, too. But she was not strong in body.

Others knew this better than she did herself. Katherine would sniff that she had never been seriously ill a day in her life. She could cite her record of perfect attendance during her years of service at the Glen St. Mary school, as if in proof.

Leslie could (and had) pursed her lips at this. She could (and had) retorted that Miss Brooke’s perfect attendance had on some days been uncivilized, mere infliction of her misery upon her hapless students. She could (and had) observed that Miss Brooke did not need a doctor less than anyone else; she was only stingier than most. Miss Brooke was not robust; she was only stubborn.

These observations had been fatal.

The one weakness to which Katherine was ever prepared to admit in herself was that she always liked people who told her the truth about herself. In fact, they were the only people she ever liked. And very few had the necessary humor and gumption, so Katherine had led a rather lonely life of it.

Before Leslie.

Katherine slipped back into some form of consciousness, not as hands adjusted and smoothed her from a fetal curl into civilized repose, but only when fingers popped something bitter into her mouth.

“Wassa’?” Her voice was as soft and broken as a dead bird’s wing.

“Hemlock. Swallow it.”

Katherine gave not the faintest hint of smile nor snarl either, and this alarmed Leslie deeply.

It was amazing, the sheer quietude with which Leslie could arrange pillows, haul fever-heavy limbs, tuck in the edges of blankets. She supported Katherine’s head as she tilted back her head to receive willowbark tea.

Afterwards, the brush. Still almost fairy-soft about it—the fever may have kept Katherine in rather fuzzy a cocoon—Leslie brushed out her thick hair, bit by bit, moving from tips to top, from her right to her left.

She did this as if there was quite all the time in the world, and only let out a _tchah_ of impatience when her hand momently slipped from Katherine’s neck, and the erstwhile boarder let the whole weight of her head fall forward. “Enough of that,” said Leslie. Her voice was still deceptively smooth water. There was no snap, no quarrel, nothing common in it. A queen’s voice, with a queen’s assurance. “You can hold up your own head.”

Katherine could, and Katherine did. She gazed at Leslie with fever-glazed eyes. There was no faking that last symptom.

“You love me,” she said, with a smile so soft and unfocused that she appeared to have stolen it from someone else’s face.

Leslie averted her gaze and continued to brush. “Miss Brooke,” she said patiently, “no one has ever died in this bed. That is an asset, in my world.”

Katherine’s smile did not fade some minutes. Though she was genuinely asleep, when Leslie finished tucking her in, and left.

* * *

“I can’t understand,” said Dr. Blythe. “How did she come to be out there so long, Mrs. Moore?”

It was day three of the fever. It was not so very high, and yet breaking it was beyond Leslie’s skill. Out of an abundance of caution, she had decided that she could not live with herself and her conscience if she did not call in the doctor, and entirely rule out some coincidental infection.

In the farmhouse kitchen—bare of cupboard, but thick on study comfort and solid cleanliness—Leslie did not reply at once.

Lie she would not.

Yet she was inclined to say that it was none of the doctor’s business.

Leslie had already been very brief but very frank about any circumstances that seemed relevant: Katherine had come unannounced that Friday to visit. She had left about a half-hour before the storm. She had been out in the deluge some four hours before pounding upon the back door for re-admission.

“Russell,” said Dick.

“I’m sorry?” said the doctor.

“She rescued Russell.” Dick was currently cuddling the kitten, who was all but growing fat on three solid days of clinging, to which the poor creature had resigned herself with a preternatural patience. No full-witted human was ever so indulged, not by the race of felines from the time of the pyramids to the age of steam. But the kitten seemed to take as much pity on Dick as most people did. There was Dr. Blythe himself, brow still furrowed over Katherine Brooke’s case, yet still with an absent-minded smile when his eyes fell upon Dick Moore. Harmless Dick!

“That was very good of her,” said the doctor. “How is Russell?”

“Good,” said Dick, complacent as a child. “But it was good of Leslie.”

“Was—” Here, Dr. Blythe had the civility to break off the singsong spell with the innocent, and to address the woman of the house. “Tell me you were not out in the storm, too? I have a heart for a good cat, Mrs. Moore, but…”

“No, Leslie stayed with Dick.” Dick was not yet ready to leave off babbling. “She was awful mad at the schoolma’am. Schoolma’am let Russell out. Dick was awful upset.”

Dr. Blythe gazed at Leslie, eyebrows raised.

“I told Miss Brooke that she was never to darken my door again,” said Leslie, placidly, “not without that cat.”

“Glory and thunder,” breathed the doctor. “No wonder she’s so ill. Mrs. Moore, how could you?”

Leslie sounded bored. “Mr. Moore was, as he says, quite distraught. I did not think of the coming storm. Certainly I would not have expected her to hunt the creature in it.”

“Yes, but,” reproved the doctor, “we’ve all _met_ Miss Brooke!”

“What course of treatment do you recommend, doctor. And what will we owe you, for your trouble.”

The doctor gave his instructions. “Then, as for payment, I could accept none either from my children’s teacher, nor from you. Just make her well again, Mrs. Moore.”

Leslie retained her frost. By _‘we’_ she had meant herself and her husband. And yet she at once felt very foolish, for having done so.

* * *

The fever broke the very evening after Dr. Blythe’s visit… and likely had nothing to do with his arrival at all. Because of course it was so.

“He thinks I am very cruel to you,” observed Leslie dryly, as she fed Katherine her dinner.

Katherine’s tea-colored eyes caught the warm glint off the fire as she gazed at Leslie. She had been removed to the kitchen, in order to warm her initial shivering by the grate.

Her voice was hoarse, but stronger than it had been. “He hasn’t seen you nurse me.”

“I never nurse.”

“Nor seen your face, when I said I loved you.”

“Really, Miss Brooke, you said that _I_ loved _you_.”

“Did I?” Katherine was still vague, if no longer with fever, then with fatigue.

“You did.”

“I never had much patience, for the trope of sickbed confessions.” Katherine’s expression was still very grave, and her face was pale and drawn. But her eyes remained warm.

Leslie’s own lineless, remote face served as a mere frame. Mechanically, she offered another spoonful of broth.

Katherine wasn’t hungry, but she took it anyway. Each sip was very sweet.

It might have been sweeter, if it hadn’t been for the sadness in Leslie’s eyes.

Katherine supposed she ought to be much more worried than she could make herself feel—but it was _so_ nice. She was very glad that Leslie had rejected being called a nurse. Good! Katherine was prepared to oblige with all her heart. Too impersonal, that.

Katherine had never been cared for so in her life as she had been these past days. The love-starved child in her drank greedily.

The seasoned, soldierly woman in her, however, was also being restored to life and health.

“What’s the matter, Leslie?” she asked quietly.

Her queen raised her brilliant eyes from where they had been cast down upon a dark, shadowy corner of the room. “My name is Mrs. Moore.”

“That’s not it,” dismissed Katherine. “There are times when you are the patron of tragedy, ‘Mrs. Moore,’ and tonight are not they. Why, you haven’t thought about _Mister_ Moore in days. _I_ am the one preying on your mind, now.” She said all this very comfortably, and not altogether without some glee, at those last words.

Leslie stared. It wanted to be with freezing dignity, but those eyes could not manage it—not tonight.

Outside, the winds were kicking up again. All four of them; all four hundred of them.

“You’re tired,” said Katherine, voice rather too kind. “You’ve taken such good care of me, since the storm, and are quite worn out; that must be all it is.”

She knew that Leslie would scorn the idea. She knew that those eyes would flash ice.

“Your affections are transactional, Miss Brooke,” said Leslie at last. Her voice was pitched so low that it could scarcely compete with the fire, nor the rattle of the pane.

Katherine’s could. “I beg your pardon!”

Leslie’s lips cracked a humorless smile. “Oh, I do not mean to say that you take advantage. You are never the debtor—you never can let yourself be the debtor. I was perhaps like you, once… but I’m helplessly in debt, Miss Brooke, and it’s taught me better.”

Miss Brooke was dubious. “Are we now speaking in figures, or not?”

“I’ve mixed them. Do keep up, teacher dear. Crushing penury is healthy, in that way, for it lets me see the rest, which is not so visible.”

“The rest.”

“I wish you had come back without the cat,” said Leslie, with a helpless simplicity.

“I am not quite sure you would have ever forgiven me, otherwise.”

“That is why I wish you had come back without the cat.” Leslie spoke now to the fire, which reddened one of her cheeks brilliantly. “I should have forgiven you, and then it should have meant something… it would have done you no harm, to not be quite sure.”

Both of Katherine’s cheeks were reddening. “I do not see the significance, dear Leslie. But I certainly _feel_ that I have fallen very short indeed!”

“You never fall short—”

“I brought back that cat because I should be ashamed to be yet another person in your life whose love is a burden to you—”

“That is why you threw away the best years of your life, discharging an imaginary debt—”

“You deserve someone who pulls their weight, for a change!”

“That is why you nearly threw away your life, expiating your guilt—”

“I’ll hear a little less,” hissed Katherine, “about ‘throwing away one’s life’ from _you_ , Mrs. Moore!” 

Mrs. Moore flashed pale brilliance.

“My debts,” she said, “are not imaginary. They don’t depend upon your feelings, Miss Brooke, nor dissipate with grand heroics. Nor does Mr. Moore dissipate, because I find him inconvenient—”

Katherine had grasped both her wrists. The spoon clattered upon the floor.

“Leslie. Leslie, I know. I know very well!” Leslie looked up only slowly and dumbly from the fingers encircling her, claiming her hands. “What fool is it, who has asked you to dispense with _your_ honor? Leslie!”

Leslie’s eyes slipped back down to Katherine’s hands. There was a sort of awe in them.

“There is enough room in your prison for me, too.”

* * *

The firs were stirring with some knowledge that was not lawful for man to know… unwise for woman to contemplate… and of which even a whisper should drive any tree to the shattered mirror of madness. 

It did. 

And yet the night was no whit more wild than the third night before, when Katherine had forged down the harbor road at the first crack of lightning, rather than turning home.

The four winds—the four hundred winds—had blown themselves out, by morning.

They left even the firs thinned and bereft, with the the oaks and poplars altogether stripped.

They left the skies clean and white and fresh, for the sun to polish and warm.

But at dawn that morning, it seemed little but crows and chickens stirred, and them none too noisily. The world was hushed, both broken and new.

Leslie slept in that morning—the first time she had allowed herself to sleep in for years. Perhaps it was beyond her to resist. The boarders’ bed was far more comfortable than her own. And Katherine slipped out soundlessly, not disturbing her. She was steady, if perhaps still rather pale and slow, as she took charge of doing up fire and breakfast, and of keeping the spongey-minded little man and his well-fed cat very quiet, so as not to disturb their queen.


End file.
